Jira Reviews

Pros

I love Jira because of the Atlassian ecosystem. Our Product Management team lives out of Jira for our day-to-day task management, and we work in a 2-week Scrum style. We use Confluence for our documentation and product requirement documents, then Jira Product Discovery for road mapping, prioritization and idea tracking. All products in the Atlassian ecosystem work seamlessly together.

Jira gets a lot of hate for being complicated and hard to implement, but like many things, its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. I love Jira because its flexibility means it's a tool that our whole company uses, from Development to Customer Support to Product Management. This makes it easy to collaborate with other teams, without having to jump between and learn other platforms. Having a couple of people in the company who know Jira inside out mitigates any implementation challenges some may complain about.

Cons

I despise that Jira third-party tools/addons are billed by the number of active Jira users you have. This means that if you want to use an addon for a small team of 5 users, but you have 100 Jira users, you have to pay for 100 licenses. This billing model makes no sense and means it is financially not feasible to use most addons, which our teams could greatly benefit from using

Pros

I love how customizable and configurable Jira is for my company and our teams. All teams have different needs, whether it's kanban or scrum and Jira can handle any need we have. It keeps us organized and ensures we capture all requirements and all bugs so we don't miss anything. The reporting and queries are fantastic and so are the dashboard capabilities.

Cons

The queries are great, but I would like better reporting - we had to add Jira apps to our instance in order to get good reports. I do think Jira is pricey as well.

Alternatives Considered

Azure DevOps Services

Reasons for Choosing Jira

TFS was clunky and outdated - it didn't fill our needs and we were not interested in upgrading.

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira is easier to use and we liked the UI better.

Pros

It is what everyone knows and learns how to use.Jira can handle multiple workflows, highly customizable for each team wich is highly appreciated by the different teams. It is not a one size fits all.

Cons

It keeps on adding new tools to the offer, if not always well-integrated, especially from an admin and billing pov.

Alternatives Considered

Binfire, Basecamp and monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Jira

The other ones didn't math or justify the cost of change

Pros

Jira is an amazing project management tool that helps team quickly get started with the tool on features to track their daily tasks, backlogs, srpints, & reports. The ecosystem is so flexible that it allows integration with many tools and wide range APIs to get the necessary things done in minutes!

Cons

There are still improvements required from UI/UX perspective where the issue view page can be made lot better. The complex workflows with the validators would require some more options in place.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Jira

It provides easier configuration for workflows achieving the granular reuirements to make the process.

Pros

Jira helps all teams in the company to align for the size of company we are. The business team can see what happens in tech/product and the tech/product can see what’s going on in the business team. Visibility is key to provide feedback on both ends.

Cons

It has to be set up by an admin, it’s less flexible for the team to take ownership over.

Alternatives Considered

Miro, monday.com, Asana and Notion

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Kanban was more suitable in Jira and the product/tech team wanted visibility.

Switched From

Miro

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Price and a product already used by another team.

Pros

We can easily create tasks and stories to manage the project and plan the sprints.
Once sprint is done, we can generate the reports to see the burndown charts.
We can check the sprint capacity dynamically by assigning the sprint to our tasks or stories.
Can generate different types of dashboards for issues or tasks by using JQL quires.

Cons

Need to learn JQL to create advanced filters or dashboards.
Sometimes adding a new column to a filter little tricky.
Exporting the data to excel is also sometimes not easy.

Pros

Functionality, the service works smoothly without any major bugs or issues, and you can always find help in their documentation or in any online community.

Cons

The additional features like the Gantt Chart or other products are not always easy to use. Sometimes you are required to add apps from the store and pay for features that in my opinion should be supported for free. Configuration can be difficult for someone who doesn't have experience with Jira.

Pros

jira has the capacity to process several files and is aimed at large teams but also it handles all bugs which makes its use easy and quick

Cons

since I have been using the Jira software I have never personally had any problems either with the user interface or at the technical level

Alternatives Considered

WordPress and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Jira

I chose Jira software over the others for the simple reason that Jira is a simple and easy to use tool.

Pros

It is quite easy to setup a project in JIRA and customize to our needs.

Cons

Some add-ins needs to be purchased at additional cost.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow Customer Service Management

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Price of ServiceNow was too high when compared with JIRA

Pros

Ability to track tickets via Jira as well as via email
Accountability and transparency to see where a ticket is and who is dealing with it

Cons

I think it can be overwhelming sometimes for a basic user

Pros

This software is very easy to manage day to day work,progress,assignments and forcast for different phases of projects..It turned out to be very effective tool in order to achieve efficient and cost efffective operational model in enterprise organizations

Cons

This software should have most reporting widgets and open integration ports so that various data connectors can be integrated for limitless reporting

Alternatives Considered

Power BI Connector for Jira

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Jira is more user friendly

Switched From

Confluence

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira is easy to handle and support from maintenance perspective

Pros

Jira is an immensely powerful issue management tool. It's JQL language provides ultimate flexibility to satisfy the needs of all roles on a product/project team. It's easy to use (if agile concepts are familiar to you and semi-intuitive if they're not), easy to deploy (especially if you're using Jira Cloud) and easy to integrate with.

Cons

The pricing model for add-ons. You could have a 100 users registered to your Jira instance, have an add-on that is used by a small handful of power users, and still be paying a license fee for all 100 users. Very annoying!

Alternatives Considered

Trello, monday.com and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Basecamp was rudimentary and unable to effectively visualise our cross-company/cross-team workload.

Switched From

Basecamp

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira was the most aligned with our internal development workflows and flexible enough to work for both technical and non-technical users.

Pros

The best part about JIRA is how visual the UI is. It is incredibly easy to track down and track through different tasks and sprints without having the hassle of digging through a 90s-style ticket system. My other absolute favorite thing about JIRA is the simple ability to tag individual users basically anywhere. This saves an incredible amount of time due to the way in which notifications are handled in and outside of the system. Collaboration is beyond easy with JIRA.

Cons

Many of the most important features are being deprecated over time, and the customer service component of the software seems ineffective at best. Some of the best features have been removed and the highest priorities on their roadmap aren't those that would severely increase users' quality of life. I think this is part of a growing process that the company is going through, but it does cause some heartache on the regular to think that our business desires aren't being met - even through months of users requesting the simplest of features.

Alternatives Considered

Redmine and Trello

Switched From

Redmine and Trello

Reasons for Switching to Jira

JIRA had a much more robust interface than the other options we were looking into, and overall it was the visual aspects of JIRA that won out over the others.

Pros

I have been using Jira from last 5+ years now for Backlog management, Requirements management, Bug tracking and creating Dashboards for project review meetings with leadership. It's extremely flexible tool where you can configure your own workflows and customize it as per your project's needs. It's my go-to Agile project management tool (especially for Scrum). It's so easy to create and manage user stories, bugs, technical tasks etc. You can tag your user stories as per Epics and Features, you can also add labels to each ticket. You can track the status of any ticket and also see the bandwidth allocation of various teams. In JIRA, you can add advanced search filters to view only those user stories that has particular combination of fields (like specific assignee, status, epic name etc.). Moreover, JIRA Dashboard provides a bird's eye view of the overall project status which gives the real time visibility to you and the leadership team.

The UI is very clean and simple and it makes Agile Development very productive, once you get the hang of it. Plus, it's very well integrated with many popular apps like Google workplace, workday, slack etc.

But there is definitely a steep learning curve with Jira. The success of this product largely depends on how your management/leadership standardize various processes and workflows within Jira.

Cons

Jira doesn't allow you to add multiple assignee on one user story, and this becomes a concern when multiple developers are working on one story.

Also, it's hard to get support from Atlassian when you are facing some technical issues.
Additionally, in my experience, I have found that as Jira provides great level of customization, it can become really messy, if multiple management styles are involved during project planning phase. The workflows can get overly complicated and as a Product Owner, you find yourself stuck in updating the ticket statuses all day long.

Pros

The ease of use is such a timesaver. Also the many integrations with other attlassian products is great, it really saves a lot of time and it's a great as documentation.
Jira is the reference for software development team, and with good reason1

Cons

It can be costly and there are nasty sides on the licensing.
For example, you can't use plugins for a limited number of users, and only pay for that the number of users. Although in some cases I can understand, in some other cases it makes no sense and it's really a barrier.
An other nasty side we experienced is the lost of investment when upgrading during a license term. We bought a license for 2 years, without any discount wrt the 1 year license deal. Within the year, we already needed to extend the number of licensed users so we had to upgrade the license. We then had no way to recover a part of the investment of the remaining time of the initial license ... never buy more than 1 year!

One last BIG negative is the recent forced move to cloud. We have always ran Jira and Atlassian products on prem. A recent decision by Atlassian is forcing the user away from the current on prem solution. This is simply not what we want or can. I'm sure this will be an issues with several European organizations where the move to cloud wrt GDRP is not that easy or not a company priority.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira has better integration with other development tooling and is much more user friendly from UX point of view.

Pros

- Jira has the most critical features that every small to enterprise companies use to manage project management, application development, time tracking, workflow automation for various business use-cases, integrations with external applications like Copado (CI/CD) tool for Salesforce
- Jira has very important usage in our company. All the teams uses Jira to manage all the deliverables and for tracking project management, feature releases, etc.

Cons

- The pricing of jira can be cheaper when compared to other alternate solutions available in the market
- The support of Jira can be more available in all times to resolve critical issues
- The UI can be more customized to better fit every customer needs without lot of overhead time

Alternatives Considered

monday.com and Wrike

Reasons for Switching to Jira

- The pricing for Jira was good when compared to other products. - The customizations that Jira provides OOB was a huge plus for us to make the decision

Pros

The ability to manage tickets day to day was a must. Some of these were coming from external parties and others internally. We ended up using it across the company in many departments so the ability to have multiple projects was a must.

Cons

Cloud version support for plugins and customisation is limited to only the basics. Its not possible with dive in to it inner workings and develop your own without tapping the APIs externally.

Alternatives Considered

Freshdesk

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Excel was not great once a small business started to grow fast.

Switched From

Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Ease of use and it fit our model and gave use the options we needed to cut down on the time its was taking to track and monitor work flow.

Pros

Jira has a weekly release schedule which means the product is always being improved or changed. This is usually a good thing, although I will admit that sometimes it isn't. Jira is also incredibly functional for a broad range of use cases, from managing a simple to-do list, team task tracking, process automation, to software development. They do a good job of making it user friendly and easy to onboard, especially since they started making drastic UI improvements a little over a year ago.

Cons

A consequence of being capable of so much is that it can be hard to configure initially. More specifically, which features you need and which can be disabled. There are a lot of great features but some just complicate the workflow, and it usually takes time to figure this out.

Alternatives Considered

Teamwork.com, Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Basecamp, Wrike and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira was either more user-friendly or offered a solution that was geared more towards software development than the other applications. I also like the direct integration with Confluence, even though Confluence itself can be annoying at times.

Pros

Jira is very great for project and task management. It provides lot of flexibility around custom fields and reports. The easy to use reporting functionalities allow to have one simple view across multiple projects and initiatives

Cons

While the interface is simple to use.. it feels very simple. Our users are not very adaptive to Jira as it doesn't have jazzy UX. It's not clean and modern looking like other alternatives out there.

Alternatives Considered

Basecamp and monday.com

Reasons for Choosing Jira

MS project was very heavy to use. Did not provide easy interface for running a whole portfolio. The gantt chart was good but wasn't user friendly to print out or manage and make decisions based on it for the whole portfolio. The cost of MS Project for all users was also very expensive.

Switched From

Microsoft Project

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira provided better reporting and performance. It was also a bit cheaper. Plus, Jira being Atlassian product, it fit well into our ecosystem.

Pros

Using Jira, the team can plan and track their work, Jira is a powerful platform for managing tasks of different numbers and types for any type of product or project, as it offers the possibilities of collaboration as well as documentation of all databases and key documents related to all activities. The number of tickets that can be dealt with And because of the ability to integrate and customize it, which is very useful for organizing the affairs of tasks and team members, we can consider it a practical agile methodology that ensures the teamwork excels and achieves its goals. I love Jira's ability to filter missions, which increases our ability to see details of all missions, check the start and end dates as well as team member comments and attachments they've made. All this is done easily without much effort searching. I appreciate the reports that we get and the ease of customizing them to suit our needs, as they include the information that we want to display, especially related to a summary of the workflow during a certain period of time. I love the fact that Jira is easy to customize and integrates with many of the apps we use.

Cons

It's not a bad thing for people who are looking for the right way to manage products and projects, even though Jira looks complicated and members need to put in some time and effort to learn how to use it well. This topic might not be right for everyone, which could hurt the quality of both the inputs and the results.

Pros

Jira is highly customisable, and also has plugins. It allows you to monitor your projects and provided granulated access to individuals. You (or your admin) can set roles for the project and associates those roles to certain activities and then associate the roles even further to individuals.

You can organize your tickets in sprints and releases as well as monitor workload and task assignment to your team during sprints (or whatever other form of software delivery you wish to choose).

Cons

Pricing model. Currently, you have a choice of server vs cloud setup. If you have a team that can maintain the server instance, I'd recommend going to server because you have a lot more plugins you can use on server and you can set it up the way you want. The best thing is the licenses are a one-time cost, as opposed to lower, but monthly and forever costs on the cloud portion.

The other thing that is to be considered is that the plugins you choose need to have the same level of range for hte user count. i.e if your jira is for 101-250 users, all your plugins will need a license level of the same range, i.e 101-250 users. Something to consider if you are thinking about moving to Jira.

Pros

I am a technical writer who used JIRA as my first introduction into working in a close-knit, agile programming environment. I really appreciated the clean design, multiple ways to accomplish tasks, and logical visual representations of concepts. Is something assigned to you? It has your face on it. We had several development teams working in tandem and JIRA allowed for each team to structure their sprints according to their own preferences (some had more traditional set up and others used kanban). As time went on we were able to add more projects to JIRA, after transitioning off of ClearQuest for our baseline fixes, and while there is certainly a learning curve getting established programmers who have used one system of tracking for 10+ years converted to using JIRA, most everyone was able to transition and feel comfortable within a few weeks. Speaking as a non-programmer, I found JIRA to be incredibly useful and easy. Tracking writing and editing projects through development didn't require any specific setup or features and it was all around a great tool.

Cons

While it was great that every project could be tracked from our one JIRA site for my relatively small (30ish people) development team, any time fields needed to be added for one specific team to track something for stories or bugs, it was there for everyone. This led to having rather cluttered add screens that meant for a good deal of scrolling. I know some of this was surely user error, but having a bit more control would be nice. Also, the search function occasionally would just... not work. At all. As adorable as the sad faced little magnifying glass was when this happened, it would be very frustrating to lose functionality without warning. Being browser-based always makes for risk and some days would just be constant checking of if JIRA was up again so untracked progress didn't fall through the cracks.

Pros

The best part about JIRA is the ability to keep track of all work being done via tickets. I love that JIRA works for all kinds of styles of work. We work within an Agile environment, with some teams using Scrum and other teams using Kanban. No matter how the team is structured, they utilize JIRA tickets. This is great because there is a single repository for all work being done and we can easily search for tickets across all the different teams. The use of Epics vs. Stories is very easy too. We can keep track of what tickets belong to which effort with ease and show the progress of work through the tickets. We can also easily maintain a backlog of tickets. If two separate people submit a similar ticket (or at least two tickets that reference the same work effort), we can combine those tickets easily so that we aren't feeling overwhelmed with more tickets than actual work.

Cons

The biggest debate among our team members is when it is necessary to create a ticket. JIRA has created a culture of needing to log every little thing, even if it takes just a moment to complete the work. Sometimes, it takes longer to create the ticket than to complete the task at hand. That tells me there is too much reliance on JIRA to report work completed. It causes some in management to show that their department is succeeding simply by the number of tickets completed. But the tickets don't tell the whole story, especially because there isn't a time component to those tickets being completed.

Pros

- Manage multiple projects under one project in JIRA and works well for a complete program
- Email notification when any changes made in JIRA makes collaboration efficient
- JIRA board (Scrum Board) in JIRA and defining specific project JQL to filter the issues in JIRA makes it more user friendly for scrum masters who are managing multiple scrum teams in a program
- Automated dashboard creation and ability to create different charts makes it very easy for showing management rpeorting on different scrum teams progress in a sprint
- Sprint and version reports (out of the box) which provides burn down charts and which issues are lying in one state for more than a specific period of time helps scrum team to move forward and resolves impending issues
- Ability to link issues for dependency and flexibility to define SDLC life cycle for an issue on a board makes it very handy on any type of project

Cons

- No single view is available to see clearly how dependencies are moving forward
- There are times when single issue has to be given to multiple people like in pair programming one way is to create sub task but that is not an approach that was liked by scrum teams
- There macros / gadgets that comes with the JIRA product are very minimum they should add more gadgest for reporting purpose.
- Yes, there are different third party gadgets but sometimes those are not JIRA / atlassian recognized and for enterprise application and corporates using JIRA does not go ahead to deploy those third part gadgets on the server model.

Pros

Jira is clean and it is simple yet powerful. You can use it for your basic ticket workflows from the get go and expand as you grow or the tasks you wisch to cover branch out. It is easy to customize the ticket views to contain the information you want to use and avoid cluttering. The Workflow editor is one of the most powerful I came across in all my professional career. It might not seem so much of an importance but believe me, when your business grows unexpected necessities will arise and you will suddenly be required to track tasks you never though about. Jira will have you covered and allow you to add different task types which traverse task-type specific phases and have corresponding stati. Also you have all the world of notification and responsibility tracking ping-pong covered as you go. Two further things are woth mentioning: First the Atlassian World (the Wiki Confluence and build system Bamboo and many other products) integrate flawlessly and it actually really makes using them fun. Jira is one of the tools, that make you smile when you are required to use it no matter the task to track, its jus smooth, convenient and above and beyond provides a rich ecosystem for free and commercial plugins even for rather exotic use cases.
Also, the license Model behind it scales fantastically. When we introduced it we were a small company with 8 people (we are now going strong towards the 200) and it was critical to keep cost for our tools reasonable. Jira got us covered.

Cons

When we scaled, the License was not as flexible in higher user tiers as it was in the lower ones. Also once upon a time an update went wrong and we had to invest a bucketload of time and brain power to get everything back up to speed. We did run jira on premise and hat some custom plugins so there might be some of the tripwires: In case you use plugins they must be available in the version you wish to upgrade to and this might require some research prior to updates. Also, you can make a science out of the workflow and notification configuration. In case it is not documented well when you do it it might get you into trouble.